I Try And Fail To Take Photos of Fireflies

Today's bento! Starting the week with some more miso fish (I think I still have enough for one or two more days :p) and some pumpkin salad!

Idk if it's just Japan but I find pumpkins to be very sweet, even if they're just boiled. These have a kefir-mayo dressing. It's supposed to be yogurt-mayo but since I made kefir... 😁

By the way, the dressing may sound weird but it's actually really good. Not too rich and goes well with the pumpkin

#thegreatcookingexperiment

The beginning

Image from: https://www.sasebo99.com/event/61978/

Yesterday, the pastor mentioned something about fireflies and curious about it (sorry City person never saw a firefly before) I went to Google and saw that there was a firefly event going on in the evening!

I decided to go and try and take photos.

Spoiler: I did not succeed.

Getting there was a challenge. I've never been to that part of Sasebo and managed to get myself lost twice. Was soooo flustered by the time I arrived I could barely park.

On the bright side, I did get to see a lot of paddy fields which is something that... I also see on the way to work 😅 But this time it was up close because the road passed through them! (It was a weird road, let's go with that)

The place

The event was pretty small but there were quite a few families there.

Wandered over to the small row of stalls...

And ended up buying hotaru manju (firefly buns).

They're basically steamed buns (like the red/orange ones we have in terms of texture) with a raisin in the middle. These were freshly/same-day made and cost 300 yen for 6.

And everyone along the river.

There were a lot of problems

First problem: I found out that you can't focus in the dark and I forgot to set my focus to manual while it was still bright ><

At least I remembered to bring a tripod (yay google) so I still had a small chance of catching a photo.

Until other people's light got in my way 😭

And I realised that I couldn't see so I was just randomly pointing the camera

But then it happened

Turns out that to be able to get a good shot of fireflies, you need a really long exposure and that turns them into streaks of light.

Unfortunately, I suck at photography so my photos aren't good, even if the fireflies are in them.

And there were still problems, like the light from cars ><

There were also fireflies in the trees but I couldn't get a photo of them ><

What just happened to Dayre? I couldn't access it for an hour plus...

I mean, I would understand if the costs are too prohibitive to keep it running but at least give us advance notice so we can save our posts.

Back to my fireflies

The best I could do

Thanks to google, I learnt about something called "stacking", where you basically layer photos on top of each other. It's normally used for star photos, but you can use it for fireflies, like I did, to make the photos look more lovely.

What you need is a series of photos taken at the same place (tripods are really essential)

This is probably the faintest but it looks most like fireflies haha. Little glowing dots

And this is the most dramatic one I have and it's not very good 😭😭

I was considering going back to try again but I did more googling and found out that this is the end of firefly season!!! Makes me really glad that I went out there yesterday.

!!!

I think 100% of the people who follow me also follow @doubleoxm and/or @jojobeans cause they're good writers but really wanted to help spread the word haha.